Fallen Embers
by Basara549
Summary: Years after the End of the Circle, Dana considers her past, and confronts a novel writer over a story that puts her and her first crush in a bad light. A counterpoint to the one truly AWFUL official Robotech novel, "The Masters' Gambit" (the only one not reprinted - rights issues), and its many continuity violations. and, of course, there's a couple of twists at the end.


**Fallen Embers: An alternative epilogue to the Jack McKinney Robotech Novels**

**By: Stan Bundy**

**"Once, all dreams were worth keeping.  
>I was with you." -Enya, Fallen Embers<br>**

**2050:**

The wars over Robotechnology had been over for years, and as society rebuilt itself, people began publishing their memoirs of the wars, and those of others. Of course, many of those whose stories were told weren't around any more.

The book being sold was called "The Masters' Gambit", and was hyped as being the true story of the years just prior to the Masters' arrival, involving an early incursion into Japan. The author was having a publicity appearance, signing the books at a bookstore in Manhattan.

"So, you're Jack McKinney?" the thirty-something blonde asked, having reached the front of the line.

"Yes, I am. Who should I make the autograph out to?"

"The person pulling the book from circulation..."

"Huh?"

She suddenly reached out, grabbed him by the arm, and flipped him over the table, slamming him to the ground, then stomped his diaphragm to ensure the breath was knocked out of him.

"You should be more careful who you tell lies about," she seethed. "You WILL pull your book from the market, and issue a formal apology to all the people, living and dead, that you slandered. If not, the next time I'll cut these off and stuff them someplace you won't like, instead of this."

With that, she kicked the prone man in the crotch, and stomped out of the bookstore.

"Someone call the police!" someone yelled.

"I think that WAS the police - or at least, she trained half of them."

"You mean?"The author turned pale.

"Yes, that was Colonel Sterling, and I think she was making a promise, not a threat. I suggest you take your books and leave before she comes back to see if you want more pain in your future."

Later that evening, the dejected author moped around at his hotel's bar, having found all his publicity tour events having been canceled out from underneath him. Apparently, Colonel Sterling didn't like her wild youth getting revealed to the public - though, truth be told, most of his sources were suspect to begin with, and a lot of the "historical novel" was based on what he could read between the lines of those sources' stories, not what was actually said.

Still, he figured it to be a fair approximation, like that steamy romance novel that one of his colleague had written a few years back about the relationships between Claudia Grant, the Hunters and Minmei in the last few weeks before the destruction of New Macross, that neither of the Hunters challenged openly (and of course the other two were no longer around to say anything about it). Comments by some that their silence was in order to not give the smut any free publicity were ignored, as others chose to interpret their silence as an admission of the events depicted in that book, and it spawned a horde of imitators (including himself).

But, with this story, he'd thought he'd struck pure gold - a tale of a possible incursion on Earth by the Tyroleans two years earlier than their mass arrival and blockade, with the resistance led by a disgraced pilot rumored to have been intimate with Dana Sterling when she was only 13. Three years of tracking down leads from the few survivors of the destruction of Japan by the Invid, had finally resulted in the book - but now this...

"I don't suppose you'd want to know what really happened,"a voice said from above. "Not that bullshit you were fed from those cyberpunks."

"Colonel, fancy seeing you here. Is this a social call, or business?"

"A little of both." Dana fell into the seat across from him, shaking the rain from her hair. "You're not the only one who needs a drink now and then. I've lost so many friends over the years; people I've cared about, too. I even find it ironic that the one person I truly loved, that still I grieve for the most, even the serious historians seem to treat as some sort of silly schoolgirl crush or cold attempt to turn an enemy agent. If anyone falls into either of those categories, it would have been Nova, not me.

"Yet, the crazy stories attributing stuff to my childhood get all the attention. I only WISH I'd been that wild and sex-crazed - maybe my life would have been closer to normal. As it was, thanks to Zand's predations, Uncle Rolf practically kept me as a shut-in for most of my early life, until the Cyberpirate Incident. I went to private schools after that, then the Academy, but being home-schooled for most my early life by a collection of tutors and family friends made my social skills rather minimal. A lot of the stuff attributed to me - well, other than the practical jokes; those I fully admit to - were the all too common school rumors that reflected the opposite of the truth. For example; the classic story of the sluts in school spreading rumors that the sexual abstainer was an easy lay - that applied to me. And, yes, Terry was the one I was holding out for."

"Holding out - so you two didn't?"

"That's a long, sad, story. Order us a couple more drinks, and I'll tell you how it didn't go down."

**2028:**

Dana Sterling sat on the artificial bluff overlooking the three mounds that contained the last remains of New Macross city and the ships that defended & destroyed it. The devastation they represented was hardly noticeable under the summer vegetation and pale full moonlight.

Three years ago, she'd made a vow to meet someone here, someone very special to her. If that meant risking expulsion from the Academy by not only going AWOL, but going into a restricted area alone, so be it.

"He should have been here by now. Surely he hasn't forgotten our promise."

She laid back on the blankets she'd spread out for the occasion, and began watching the stars, looking for any indication of an approaching vehicle's lights. He could be arriving by air or by ground vehicle, after all, and even approaching headlights would by noticeable in this dark Montana night, so far away from the nearest remaining human outposts.

**2025:**

Dana held tightly around Terry's back, as they took his motorcycle out from Monument, to the restricted Macross area. He'd been her personal bodyguard since the incident where they'd brought down the saboteurs afflicting the Alpha Veritech program, and he was easily persuaded into driving her anywhere she wanted, as it was a chance to get away from Monument and the air field that sometimes reminded him of the tragedies of the incident. However, he almost seemed as eager to get her away to someplace private, as she was to get him there.

The Macross ruins were one of Dana & Bowie's favorite places to get away from the regimented life at the Emerson mansion, though they went there during the day, when the park was open for tours and the occasional group of picnickers willing to make the three hour road trip each way from Monument. When Weston had become their bodyguard, he would drive them, instead of the kids taking one of the organized tours, and they had explored parts of the park the tours didn't go.

On one of those trips, they discovered what they considered to be "their" place. Part of the construction of the hazard containment were several rings of berms around the old crater lake, now filled in. The berms themselves were constructed from non-contaminated refuse covered with dirt and sand. Depending on the local soil mix, season and rainfall, the berms looked like a mix of dunes and low hills, interspersed with dirt bike and ATV trails that the authorities frowned on, but weren't willing to take the effort and expense to enforce a ban of the vehicles from the site. Several of the berms had observation platforms built into their tops, from the days when there was manned monitoring of the land reclamation work and decontamination. Only the ones on the highest, outermost, ring were still used by the general public, as they were bus-accessible. The one that Bowie, Dana and Terry preferred was in the innermost ring, with a spectacular view of the greenery that had grown up on and around the mounds; and that was where Dana and Terry were heading, in the middle of the night.

Dana was more than a little aroused and a bit damp from the motorcycle ride, which she expected to lead to a night of passion under the moon. Terry helped her up the half-obscured steps to the platform, and pulled her close, kissing her... on the forehead?

"Terry?" she was confused. "Don't you want me?"

"Want? Oh, crap... So THAT'S why you wanted me to come up here. I'm an idiot. You're still too young, especially for me. I'd REALLY go to jail if we did anything. I think you're cute, and you remind me a lot of Amy when we were young." With the mention of his late fiancee, killed by a teenage hacker from a rogue school intent on discrediting all that the RDF had left behind on Earth, he got more serious. It was in proving Amy's fatal crash was the result of a control system hack, that he and Dana had met.

"Dana, I brought you here to tell you I'm leaving tomorrow, for a secret mecha development project. And while it's going on I won't be able to talk to you or Bowie."

"Is it because of me?"

"No - unless Rolf's been seeing you lust after me from afar, while I've been oblivious. But, I really do care for you, from all we've been through together. And being a teenage girl, you're, well, attractive in all sorts of ways to guys, from biology. It's nature's way of saying you're ready to take a mate, which in the couple centuries where society's evolved to consider the end, not the beginning, of puberty to be the start of adulthood, has led millions of men to all kinds of trouble. Try looking for a book called 'Lolita' sometime, after I'm gone.

"As cute as you are, you're not ready for a relationship - especially not with a burnt-out older man like me. I'm old enough to remember when I was a kid, people were not considered adults until they were eighteen, and you couldn't fly a military jet without a college degree. The 'adult-at-sixteen' thing didn't start until the SDF-1 leadership were desperate enough to recruit video game jockeys that were trainable in simulators to be replacement pilots - and even then, they made an exception for your Dad's insane skills, as he was only fifteen when he entered training. Dolza's attack made that work-around needed world-wide, especially since most of the Zentraedi were little better than young teens in mind and body."

"I'll wait for you."

"I really wish you wouldn't. You need to go to school, find some cute guy, and when you feel right, get into his pants. And, given who your parents are, and your foster father, you'll probably have to be the instigator - most guys would be too intimidated; and you'll probably want to avoid the ones that aren't, because they probably see you as a means to an end, not with any real interest in you as a person."

"I don't care."

"Oh, you will. There's a whole different world for you, once you get to high school. You'll discover boys your age, and forget all about me - which is how it should be."

"Then, make me a promise."

"What kind of promise?"

"I'll be legal when I'm sixteen. At least meet me here, on the first full moon after my sixteenth birthday, and we'll talk about this again."

"All right, but I expect you to bring your boyfriend, so I can meet him and make sure he's right for you. I don't trust Rolf not to delegate screening your dates to a secretary."

"Then, it's a date."

"Let's get you home, before someone actually thinks you succeeded in your little plot tonight."

* * *

><p>The next day, they saw Terry off from Fokker Field, on a military flight to New Tokyo, though Dana surprised him (and embarrassed Rolf) by jumping up, grabbing Terry around the neck, and kissing him on the lips. Bowie bugged Dana on the drive home, singing "Dana and Terry kissing in a tree..." all the way back home, though she was too much in a funk over Terry's leaving.<p>

Over the next two years, Terry would send recorded messages and gifts from Japan, as Dana still pined for him. Unfortunately for Dana, Terry' ideas of high school life didn't meet expectations. Her private high school was filled with people that held her Zentraedi ancestry against her, and she spent more time fighting guys (and other girls) than trying to date them. Some of the fights were even in defense of Bowie, who was considered a "band nerd" even by the other band members, occasionally got into trouble from being bullied due to his slight stature, and by some who thought he was slacking, by not living up to the standards of his father and godfather - both of which were generals that had come up from enlisted ranks to the highest echelons of the RDF.

However, contact stopped in late 2027, during a time when all the rumor said a bunch of new mecha were entering final testing, and some were even claimed to be seen in action in bootleg videos from Japan. Dana, who had just started her final eighteen months of high school after transfer to the Robotech Academy Officer Candidate School, hoped that it was a sign that Terry would return soon, and be able to keep their date.

**2028:**

After waiting for three hours, Dana heard steps behind her, and turned with her heart fluttering, awaiting the man he'd spent three long years waiting for. But to her dismay, it was not Terry, but Rolf Emerson, coming up the stairs, a sad look on his face.

"He's not coming, is he?"

"No, he's not. I've been trying to figure out how to tell you for the last year, but until you were sworn in as a cadet sergeant on your birthday, I couldn't tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"The top secret project Terry was part of. Something happened, and it's been buried under so much secret classification that I could only tell you after giving you a special security clearance - and a clearance I can only give to military personnel. The civilians who control their half of security won't even accept the official reports of what went down. The sad truth is, Terry died last year, along with everyone else in Project Tempest."

"Why?" Dana cried over and over, as her foster father held her, and carried her back to his limo. Ironically, with how Bowie kept getting busted for rules violation, he wouldn't make officer, and couldn't get the same clearance. There was only one soldier roughly her age who knew anything about the incident, and Rolf had him transferred in as a fellow OCS student to the Academy to be her confidant if she needed to talk about her loss, as there weren't any instructors cleared for the report, let alone counselors.

**2050:**

"So, if what I was told was wrong, what really did happen?"

"Well, this will take a while, and when I get going, I tend to wander off subject. Stop me if I go too far afield. But... What really happened in New Tokyo in 2027 was still in committee debate right up to the day the Invid came and destroyed what was left of the UEG and Southern Cross, as the committee that almost had it resolved, and much of their accumulated evidence, was vaporized on the last day of the Masters War.

I can tell you what Emerson & Leonard believed, as did the few members of the Japan Sector Diet that survived the incident, is that what happened in 2027 can be traced to something that on its face seems totally innocent. It was a trip for Terry and the rest of the staff of Project Tempest to the Mecha production facilities on Mars Base, to supervise tooling setup and assembly line prototyping for the new mecha designs - designs that never saw official service, other than the one-off prototypes made at the Tempest facility that got used and destroyed later in the incident. One can only imagine how differently the war with the Masters would have gone without their loss."

"How so? This is the first I've heard of there being a military tech aspect to the period."

"Project Tempest's designs were a conventional space fighter, a transforming helicopter-like mostly-atmospheric craft much simpler than the Ajax, and a couple of transforming motorcycle designs. One was a binary system for police and civil defense use, that would look like a conventional motorcycle until mated with transformational packages that were to be pre-positioned throughout each city. The second was a self-contained ground combat unit, that could enter the battlefield as a motorcycle, then transform into a battloid as tough and as heavily armed as the standard Salamander used by the Tactical Corps, but as small or smaller than the power armors used by some of the specialist units. Had these gone into service, most of space fighters we lost would have been replaced before the invasion by superior craft, the cities would have had their own veritech helicopters for civil defense, and we'd have had ten thousand or more smaller mecha for city defense, with most of the older battloids and armors retired or reduced to reserve use."

"So, what happened?"

"On the return flight, what was originally believed to have been a communication failure on board the transport, was apparently communications jamming to cover the capture of the transport by an advance force sent ahead by the Tyroleans. Once the Masters realized who was on board, they saw an opportunity to compromise Earth' defenses. They used their cloning and memory recovery technology to clone all the prisoners, as well as every casualty that didn't suffer massive brain trauma. Once the clones were made and programmed for loyalty to the Masters, all the prisoners were killed, and the captured transport released, sending a Trojan Horse filled with enemy agents back to New Tokyo.

"Once there, they instituted a security lockdown of their underground facility, and slowly called in their support units and eliminated them. However, one test pilot managed to escape the recall, and passed his prototype off to a civilian before the clones got to him. The civilian then led the clones on a chase for several weeks, barely managing, by accident more than anything, to prevent the clones from completing their attempt at a military coup that would have resulted in Japan Sector seceding from the UEG and support of the Southern Cross. Had the coup succeeded, their clones not tied to the coup would have been 'repatriated' back to the Southern Cross. This would have dispersed them into the rest of the Southern Cross worldwide for further espionage and sabotage."

"What about the EVE computer?"

"Well, her TV program was NOTHING like what the Cyberpunks told you. You could get it anywhere if you were hooked into the military satellite network, as the station was available to dependents on every RDF and Southern Cross base on Earth and Luna. Bowie and I used to watch it, growing up. Their description was based of some old 'bring back old Japanese ways' programming ran by one of the old civilian networks, not 'The Eve Show', which was a call-in show for viewers in Japan, with guests local and international. While I did find out that she really was the SDF-1's computer, and that the clones - NOT Zand, curse his black soul - tried to hack her to send Zor's hidden data back to the Masters. Zand never left Monument, and EVE never left New Tokyo after she was moved there in 2016 - where she was used to reactivate her old remote robotic body as a fully autonomous unit by Doctor Lang, out of Zand's prying eyes. You might have heard of her - Janice Em, Minmei's musical collaborator during the five years leading up to the SDF-3 launch, that supposedly enlisted and died as an REF hero on the mission."

"You're joking... You're not joking, are you...?"

"Dead serious. That's another one of those 'what if' things that's ate at me for twenty years. How things might have turned out different if Zor Prime had encountered EVE, or even Janice, who was starting to recover her memories of Zor, and according to my parents, was having an affair with a secret clone of Zor they discovered on Tyrol, that Zor's mentor had made after the Masters left for Earth... Hey, waitress! Bring me another margarita!" After the fresh drink came, Dana resumed.

"Anyway, all those 'cyber' sources of yours were Louie's old internet hacking buddies from the war, that he recruited before we bugged out from Earth. Near as I can tell, they knew the 'fake' Terry - the clone spy. He escaped the GMP dragnet, and hid out with the hackers during the war, having forgotten he was a clone, but going nuts every time he saw Tyrolean tech. His twisted memories were the basis of what they told you.

"Apparently, most of the clones started getting overwhelmed by their cell and memory donors' emotions and memory fragments, and number of them went 'nucking futz' as Louie would say, and many more went native. Most died fighting the Civil Defense Forces in Japan after their leader was killed by that civilian with the prototype, and the civilian disappeared before he could be interviewed.

"The UEG investigation team rejected any notion that they were clones, despite evidence from witnesses collected by the Southern Cross and the Japanese government - and even a few of the prisoners. At worst, they considered them simply brainwashed, if not actual traitors with no alien influence at all. The clone of the colonel that had day-to-day control of Project Tempest was also the leader of the coup attempt, and was doing things totally beyond his programming - like shagging his cell donor's girlfriend every chance he got. That's not the actions of a normal clone - they're programmed to avoid all social contact as it screws with their programming - literally, in this case. It's why the Zentraedi were sex-segregated, and the UEG presumed that any alien spies sent from the Zentraedi's creators would be just as socially clueless as a Zentraedi.

"I guess they couldn't grasp that SOMEONE had to have technology that would program a brand new clone out of a tube with a memory template, since newborn Zents are born adults speaking, walking, and potty trained, let alone pre-trained to pilot. Hell, we're till trying to figure out how every Zentraedi and Tyrolean we've found, even ones that never went to Earth, had the English vocabulary of a pre-schooler, at least for understanding the spoken word, in addition to fluent Zentraedi and varying levels of Tyrolean - both of which have Terran root words, by the way. But, I digress."

"Digress as much as you want, Colonel - you're being a gold mine for future research."

"I ended up meeting the fake Terry once, the day we picked up the cyberpunks from Japan, to take them with us back to the fleet on Wolfe's ship. It was like a kick in the gut for me; he actually BELIEVED he was the real Terry - and apparently, when he was being made, Terry tried his best to trip him up by imagining during the brain scan that he and I had a torrid sex affair, and other bits of false knowledge that if acted on, would have tipped off me, Rolf and others that something was terribly wrong.

"Several of the other clones had similar issues, according to the reports I read while commanding the 15th - Rolf let me retain my clearance for the investigation, because of how close it was to me personally. One clone was even captured after taking refuge with 'his' family; they reported him after he repeatedly tried to persuade his donor's lesbian sister to have sex with him, because his programmed memories convinced him they were lovers and that it was normal for siblings to mate. I'm not sure whether that tech was a genius or a psychopath, for managing to screw his clone's personality template up that much..."

"Wow."

"It's also one of the reasons I treated Zor Prime like I did. From the reports, I KNEW that the Masters' programming could be broken with emotions - and for some reason I'd already felt a connection to him, even before I saw his face for the first time. The Zentraedi were taught to treat the Masters, and Zor in particular, as gods, not to be trifled with. After his death, Zor's memory was even more effective as a martyr, since the only Zentraedi who actually knew of his ultimate betrayal were dead or reprogrammed, other than Dolza himself. If there was the slightest chance that he was a clone of THE Zor, getting him to wake up from his programming would have been a coup that would have shifted the balance of the war. Little did I know that the Masters thought the same thing, and his being sent to Earth was a calculated risk that he'd start waking up, so they could recapture him and do enough brainwashing to give them access to the recovered files they STILL hadn't managed to hack their way into." Dana teared up. "And, of course, the haunted look in his eyes reminded me so much of Terry's, when we first met."

"So, what happened to the Westin clone?"

"Near as we can tell, he and the Japanese woman he'd been living with died when the Invid invaded. Even if he didn't die in the initial bombardment, the Invid could SMELL Zentraedi and Tyrolean clones, much as their sensors could pick up active protoculture, and even storage batteries made from Flower extracts. If there were any other half-Zentraedi that escaped Zand's attention, they probably would have been safe, but I'd have been glowing like a protoculture bonfire to them, thanks to what all Zand did to me - and no, you can't get me drunk enough to tell you about that; don't even try.

"Another thing - the sub-plot about the supposed merger of the Southern Cross and RDF is nuts. The Southern Cross was absorbed by the RDF before 2020 - not the other way around in 2028. Leonard & Emerson were actually left in charge of the RDF by the Hunters when they left Earth. The Southern Cross name was only brought back and was applied to the RDF as a whole after the SDF-3 launch. It was as part of the backlash from, ironically, the former Southern Cross component on the REF mission stealing the mecha shipment originally intended to upgrade all the remaining non-reserve RDF on Earth to the same standards as the REF.

"While we're on the subject of leadership, while that crisis you mentioned in the book occurred in some form, it was between the GMP, the rest of the Southern Cross, and the UEG - Emerson & Leonard were too busy working together to be at odds, but in fact were scared as hell about the implications of what happened to Tempest. This was especially because, the government was ignoring all evidence of aliens, and the GMP seemed to know more about the incident, but wouldn't tell anyone out of paranoia that others might have been 'body-snatched'. Groups whose ancestry could be traced to the "old" RDF, including half the GMP, were starting to chafe at the leadership of the Southern Cross and the civilians, from the darker turn they were taking from the SPOOK influence.

"The real problems between Emerson and Leonard were a bit more complicated. The big one is that Rolf was picturing a war like the last one, the highest tech fighting against charging hordes of inferiors, and that Anatole's strategy wanted to borrow from World War II and go the 'quantity is quality' route, since he could build a dozen Battloids and Power armors for the cost of 1 Ajax or two Logans or Hovers. Both also were worried about logistics, and concentrated on energy weapons and slugthrowers, as the energy weapons were powered by the reactors, and both conventional ammo and mass driver slugs were cheap and quick to make in mass quantities.

"In the end, both were wrong. What we needed was LOTS of what the REF had intended for us, not wasting most of the Twenties developing new designs. If Edwards hadn't stolen our Alphas and Destroids, and Petrie not sabotaged what was left of the Alpha program, we'd have beaten the Masters in a matter of months. The bioroids and invid were optimized for KEWs and energy weapons from decades of fighting each other - explosives, especially proximity rounds that damage and overpressure to a large radius, overwhelmed their armor matrix, because, ironically, explosives were too LOW tech to be a 'serious' weapon in the minds of both the Masters and the Invid Regent.

"Lastly, there was also a matter of my parentage, and what happened in the Deperra Scavengers incident, that made Leonard hate even the sight of me, and transfer that to Rolf and Bowie to an extent, but that's an ugly story you need to research yourself. If you REALLY want to write a tragedy, there's the story for you."

"I think I've heard enough to start working on a revised book, and maybe a few more. I'm glad you actually talked to me, though I'll have to double-check your version of events as well."

"If you can catch Bowie and his wives, they can confirm quite a bit of it. And, if you see that crazy tech-geek former hovertanker friend of mine, tell him that 'Janice II' is an even worse name for his sex droid than 'Electric Barbarella' - and he doesn't want to know what I'll do to him if he ever dresses it up like me again. I'm not THAT endowed, thank you very much - that was the dead give-away on those leaked pictures last year supposedly of me making dirty poses back in the ATAC days." Dana stood up, motioned to her driver who'd been nursing Petite Colas at the bar while quietly listening to the conversation, and headed out the door.

"What a woman, Jack," he said to himself. "Now I know what guys like Westin and Wolfe saw in her."

* * *

><p>"This your place, ma'am?"<p>

"Yeah; one of the big apartments, at least. I keep places in all the cities where my company has security contracts."

She got out of the car, and entered the eighty year old structure that had survived a world war, three alien invasions, and multiple terrorist attacks. The closest call was just after the SDF-1 arrival, as beefed-up air security meant to deal with highjacking threats from the "the aliens are a hoax to justify the New World Order" crowd (a crowd that went from being a punchline, to eventually hijacking a spaceship to destroy the Mars Colony), accidentally blundered into and stopped a suicidal hijacking plot by religious nutjobs targeting the complex. Once again one of the two tallest office buildings in the world (all of the competition having fallen to alien attack), its current owner, a former ASC and REF special forces lieutenant, had converted it mostly into luxury apartments, one or two to a floor. But, before she headed to her floor, she went up to the restaurant up top, where the owner maintained his personal club and could usually be found practicing his act when the place wasn't actually open.

"Rough night, Dana?"

"About as usual, Lance; you were right about that trashy book about Terry, but the author wasn't too bad a guy after all, and he agreed to pull it for a rewrite. Once again, a story of too many people too eager to listen to Louie's pals and their wild-ass conspiracy stories. And I thought the Pre-Zentraedi crazy stories about UN invasion forces hiding in the salt mines were way out there, but the cybers make the Art Bell archives sound like Shakespeare."

"They were nuts when I knew them; of course, I probably came a lot closer to getting terminated by those clones than they did." Lance, an enlisted soldier recruited for his stage and music training, had been recording a song to be mixed with Eve's voice, when the alien coup went down. He had been one of the few people who had knew that Eve was a Virtual Idol, part of a project related to Tempest - the underground base that, after Tempest moved out, would have been converted into an underground shelter that could have fit all of New Tokyo and its surroundings - and was ran by EVE. The facility was as compromised as the mecha designs, as the clone spies massacred everyone that entered it, so it was never used as such, and the resulting lack of maintenance meant that the first Invid attack caved it in, taking much of the already burning New Tokyo into a volcanic abyss.

"With all that went down, I'm surprised you managed to still get into the Academy so quickly, even with Rolf greenlighting it - at least without one of Beckett's patented interrogation & body cavity searches." Zand's SPOOK group had its tentacles everywhere, manipulating the admission and recruitment for the entire Southern Cross to increase xenophobia.

"I'm glad I was there for you; when Rolf brought you in, you looked like hell."

"Me too... Then again, I think you should count yourself lucky, considering what happened a few weeks later."

"How so?"

"Well, other than that drunken fling with Angie, I think you're the only guy I've slept with that's still alive. Though, it still amuses me that I lost my virginity to a guy that owns more dresses than I do. Speaking of virgin territory; I like that story you and Scott leaked about your wives - given what I went through as a half-breed, and that at least the Zentraedi didn't enslave people the way Invid did, it's better that everyone thinks the Invid faded away back during the SDF-3 rescue, instead of getting plastic surgery and contacts after they got turned human by their departing mother."

"Yeah, it was a shock to me when I came home from the concert to the news I was going to be a father."

"Hey, I got an idea. People have been aggravating Aunt Lisa to release her journals from the misfold, since everyone's going crazy with this historical novel thing. Why don't we get that McKinney guy to write it, and spin it our way? After all, he already owes me big, since there's no way he can recall what's been sold of 'Gambit'."

"I'll think about it - and maybe you should go down to your apartment and sleep off that booze before you decide it's a good idea. By the way, the tests came back on those DNA samples you sent off to Cabell Labs on Tyrol."

"What's the news?"

"Both are viable enough to where, if you want to spend the money, they should be able to reconstitute the strands enough to create semen for in vitro fertilization. But, in no uncertain terms will they actually attempt cloning - that was a mandate left by their late namesake."

"I wasn't expecting them to clone them - hell, I was half-expecting them to recognize one of the samples from their own archives and say, 'Not only no, but HELL NO!'. Besides, both of them were cloned too many times as it stands. So, in about a year, expect me to finally join you all in the parenting set. I'll need all the help I can get." She grabbed a beer from the bar cooler, and once she saw her rain-mussed hair in the mirror, put on one of the souvenir "E.T." hats, and headed for the door.

"Put these on my tab - God, my hair's a mess. I kinda wish I'd been with you guys on that ride up from Argentina - Annie seems like she was the kid everyone thinks I was; we'd have gotten along famously."

"I bet you would - but I don't think we'd have survived the experience. Good night, Dana, and pleasant dreams."


End file.
